Communist Daniel Ortega (remember the Sandanista gangs in the 1980’s…yes that Daniel Ortega) is manipulating a coup in Nicaragua to elevate himself to become that country’s Dictator for Life. Nicaragua is next door to Honduras. In Honduras, Manuel Zelaya was manipulating the same type of coup in Honduras until last June when the legitimate government institutions of Honduras arrested him for treason, but for fear of a Hugo Chavez supported rebellion, sent him off into exile in Costa Rica in his pajamas.

The vacuous Barack Obama, a Marxist in his own right, withdrew financial support to Honduras as punishment, and joined the thugs of the world to force a Zelaya return to the Honduran presidency.

The Obama White House is totally silent about this anti-American, pro Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro coup in Nicaragua. It intends to be. Its Latin American Affairs staff is Marxist as well, mostly of the Fidel Castro stripe.

The Wall Street Journal published the following editorial on Tuesday, October 27, 2009:

“If Honduras manages to preserve its democracy despite U.S. pressure to abandon it, the tiny Central American country many wind up thanking Nicaragua’s Danny Ortega, of all people.

Last week, President Ortega inadvertently provided the best defense yet of the Honduran decision this summer to remove Manuel Zelaya from the presidency. Nicaragua has a one-term limit for presidents, and Mr. Ortega’s term expires in 2011. However, the Nicaraguan doesn’t want to leave, and so he asked the Sandinista-controlled Supreme Court to overturn the constitutional ban on his re-election.

Last week the court’s constitutional panel obliged him. The Nicaraguan press reported that the vote was held before three opposition judges could reach the chamber in time for the session. Three alternative judges, all Sandinistas, took their place and the court gave Mr. Ortega the green light. Mr. Ortega has decreed that the ruling cannot be appealed.

This is classic strong-man stuff on Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela model. Mr. Ortega’s approval rating is in the low 30% range and he’d have a hard time winning a fair election against a united opposition. But he controls the nation’s electoral council, and in the 2008 municipal races – the most important elected checks on the president – the council refused to provide a transparent accounting of the vote tally. It also blocksed international and local observers, and the vote was marred by claims of widespread fraud. The international community watched all this but did nothing. And now Mr. Ortega is taking the next chavista step toward indefinite rule.

Hondurans deposed Mr. Zelaya because he was showing similar designs on changing their constitution to be able to run agains and stay in power. Hondurans have to live in Mr. Ortega’s neighborhood, and their action against Mr. Zelaya may well have saved them from Nicaragua’s fate.’

In response to president Obama’s speech this week delaying his dithering with troop levels fighting the fight in Afghanistan, Charles Krauthammer complained:

“There is something truly disgusting about the way he cannot refrain from attacking Bush when he’s being defensive about himself.

It’s beyond disgraceful!

He won the election one year ago. He became Commander-in-Chief two months later. He announced his own strategy six months ago, not the Bush strategy, but his own strategy, and it wasn’t off-handed. It was a major address with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense with him. He’s still talking about the drift in the Bush years.

What is happening today is not a result of so-called drift in the Bush years. It is because of the drift in his year. It’s because of the flaws in his own strategy, which is what he is now reexamining. He has every right as Chief of Staff to be reexamining his own strategy.

But he ought to be honest and courgeous enough as President to simply say, “I am rethinking the policy I adopted six months ago”, and not, once again, and ‘child-like’ attack his predecessor.”

“It’s hard not to laugh when viewing the results of the federal first-time home-buyer tax credit. The credit, worth up to $8,000 for the purchase of a home, has only been available since April of last year. Yet news of the latest taxpayer-funded mortgage scam has traveled fast. The Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration, J. Russell George, recently told Congress that at least 19,000 filers hadn’t purchased a home when they claimed the credit. For another 74,000 filers, claiming a total of $500 million in credits, evidence suggests that they weren’t first-time buyers.

Among those claiming bogus credits, at least some of them were definitely first-timers. The credit has already been claimed by 500 people under the age of 18, including a four-year-old. This pre-K housing whiz likely bought because mom and dad make too much to qualify for the full credit, which starts to phase out at $150,000 of income for couples, $75,000 for singles.

As a “refundable” tax credit, it guarantees the claimants will get cash back even if they paid no taxes. A lack of documentation requirements also makes this program a slow pitch in the middle of the strike zone for scammers. The Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department are pursuing more than 100 criminal investigations related to the credit, and the IRS is reportedly trying to audit almost everyone who claims it this year.”

Keep in mind Prager fans, that when fraud from government programs is expected to run ten to twelve per cent of any program’s funding, the bigger the bribe, the greater the “financial return” for these embezzlers. It might even add up to real money. Let’s see. What is ten per cent of $500,000,000,000 again?

When interviewed on television, Mr. George said he discovered that many of the recipients of the Democratic Party largesse were undocumented immigrants. Are you surprised? ghr

A week or two ago some entity on my facebook requested my vote regarding the best President for America, and I presumed “for democracy”, over the past 50 years. JFK, GW Bush, Billie, and Ronald Reagan were the candidates.

Other “polls” have popped up here and there over the years usually adding 5o more years to the time span to include FDR and Woodrow Wilson. American history text writers having graduated from leftwing academies, like to guide readers toward voting for Democrats from early on in life. They can pummel Herbert Hoover as an aside as well.

Reagan does well these days over either time span restriction. And he should.

Lefty text writers and writers for the New York Times and other such printing agencies pump up presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Kennedy. FDR receives too much credit and failed in his efforts to lead the country out of the Great Depression, and JFK didn’t live long enough in the office to distinguish special qualities beyond his leadership durig the Cuban crisis of 1962 and his remarkable charm with the American press and public in general.

Who is usually missing from any list of candidates of special presidents is, in my view, one of our nation’s most successful “democrat”, a true believer in the “sanctity” of governments of the “people, by the people, and for the people?”

Harry S. Truman.

I was reminded of President Truman by an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, written by Victor David Hanson, “Truman and the Principles of U.S. Foreign Policy. It includes a brief list of Truman’s accomplishments, most, if not all against the wishes of his own State Department. Mr. Hanson writes:

“Truman constantly learned from his mistakes Gradually the president shed his Wilsonian trust that there would be a postwar global consensus under the aegis of the new United Nations. Instead, he came to believe that too many trans-Atlantic diplomatic elites had been terribly naive about Stalin’s murderous agenda.

Against the advice of his angry State Department, Truman supported the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948. The Berlin Airlift, the Marshall Plan, the salvation of Greece and Turkey, and success pushing the Communists north of the 38th parallel in Korea all established the parameters of the next half-century of bipartisan American foreign policy. ………

Truman’s no-nonsense Secretary of State Dean Acheson summed up the president’s doctrines: ‘Released from the acceptance of a dogma that builders and wreckers of a new world order could and should work happily and successfully together, he was free to combine our power and coordinate our action with those who did have a common purpose.’